who wants pudding?

« where? | Main | Cubicle Etiquette »

kate

August 29, 2007

may 12, 2007 - why didn't I post this? It was just a slightly drunken dream from the darkest of times, when even the thought of love, however impossible and absurd, was enough like hope to be worth talking about...

If I could have any girl in the world, all time - it'd be Katharine Hepburn, hands down.

I had other hopes for Friday evening, but it found me instead watching T.V., ordering again from Kerbey Lane, drinking beer.

Tonight, though, I had, waiting on the DVR, Pat and Mike, a classic George Cukor comedy. Hepburn and Tracy, Hepburn playing a widow who excels in tennis, golf, basketball, baseball, even boxing (though only with 8 ounce gloves, the 16 ounce gloves tend to...). Tracy plays the promoter that at first wants to exploit her, but out of respect challenges her and, of course, falls in love with her.

Hepburn, who really was a gifted athlete, plays onscreen with some of the great athletes of the time, if not all time - Babe Didrickson Zaharias, and Don Budge. The rest of the cast is warm and familiar, too - jim backus (Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island, and the voice of Mr. Magoo), Chuck Connor ("The Rifleman"). Kate also manhandles a young and very funny Charles Buchinski, who would later become Charles Bronson.

I pull the computer up and just as someone might with any other object of enfatuation in this information-saturated age, I Google her. It turns out that even Hepburn's family was the sort you want to marry into - an intelligent bunch that welcomed education and intellectual debate. Her father was a urologist who tried to inform people about the dangers of venereal disease at a time when that sort of thing wasn't talked about (hmm). Her mother championed women's rights, and helped Margaret Sanger co-found Planned Parenthood, though it appears that she didn't share Sanger's interest in curbing the procreation of the non-white folk.

I've seen her in other movies, a truly strong woman, in her time or this one, unafraid to be flawed, because at the very core of her character was someone with true passion and true compassion.

She is a bit older, and in shocking color, in Desk Set, one of her more uneven movies, and an odd bit of propaganda from International Business Machines at the dawn of commercially viable computers. Still, she's the head of a television network's research department, spouting facts and history and quoting archaic literature, all from a photographic memory linked with a passionate mind.

In Holiday, a tremendous favorite, she plays the daughter of a Vanderbiltish wealthy family, that is willing to shun the trappings of wealth and power to live a life that's grounded in music and joy and truth.

And in one of my very top all-time favorite movies, The Philadelphia Story, she plays a somewhat harsher, more flawed character that can't accept, as Cary Grant put it, human frailties ("You'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty"). Yet, even before she finds her way to that more forgiving perspective, she's fantastic, dynamic, funny, and passionate. Hell, she's got Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant in love with her, and absolutely convincingly so.

Bringing Up Baby, Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib... She's in every role she played, captured on a dozen different shiny discs, like the girl you saw in class every day but could never quite get next to.

Kate. What a life we could have had, in black and white, her brazenly in pants, me in suit and hat. We would fight, smiling all the while, thrust and parry, volleying words, and when it was all over, we'd find ourselves close, both knowing she could well wrestle herself away from me, but knowing that she chooses not to, and that choice would say everything.

And she would look at me, in soft focus, and tell me, "I'll be yar now. I promise to be yar."

And I would feel happy - truly, deeply, madly - that this woman of all women would love me, not a Grant or Stewart or Tracy, enough to give up something of that mighty will, but I'd feel a little bad, too, that she would ever think she had to. And I would smile and hold her close, and say, mixing my Cukor and Shakespeare, "Be whatever you like. An angel is like you, Kate."

Posted by Rob at August 29, 2007 12:44 AM

Comments

Posted by: mxyda at October 29, 2007 10:01 PM

Posted by: mxyda at October 29, 2007 10:01 PM

Posted by: mxyda at October 29, 2007 10:01 PM

Posted by: ylovh at October 29, 2007 10:52 PM

Posted by: cruises soma at October 29, 2007 11:05 PM